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Paper: ISBN 978-1-934909-77-5 $18
When My Mother is Most Beautiful, winner of the Loose Translation Award, is at once a powerful love letter to a mother and to language itself, delving into complex questions of family, communication, culture, and connection. These poems chronicle the difficult art of navigating multiple cultural identities, examining how languages twist and morph across cultures through the imperfect act of translation, how they bind people together and keep them apart, and even how they could be reimagined to make a better world.
Rebecca Suzuki is a writer, translator and educator from Nagoya, Japan and Queens, New York. Her writing has appeared in clotheslines, Identity Theory, KBG Bar Lit, Blue Earth Review, among others. She is also a translator from Japanese to English. She earned her MFA in Literary Translation and Creative Writing from Queens College, CUNY and is a lecturer of English there. She lives in New York. When My Mother Is Most Beautiful is winner of the 2023 The Loose Translations Prize, an annual competition sponsored by Queens College, The City University of New York, and Hanging Loose Press, and open to students and alumni of the Queens College MFA program.
Robert Hershon was one of four co-founders of Hanging Loose in 1966; he remained active with the press until his death in 2021. A widely published poet himself and a native Brooklynite, he was part of New York City’s poetry scene for more than a half-century.
He also maintained a close connection with the New York art world, counting many painters among his friends. He brought his passion for the visual arts to Hanging Loose magazine—or perhaps he brought the magazine to the visual arts. Each issue presents a portfolio of paintings and cover art by one artist.
Elizabeth Hershon, Robert’s daughter, is a painter, ceramicist, poet, teacher, and the art editor of Hanging Loose. She lives in the East Village, but grew up in Brooklyn. Robert approached her in 2020 with the idea of doing a book together: her paintings and his poems. The result is Unveiling.
Sundry Abductions by Maria Dylan Himmelman is winner of the inaugural Hanging Loose Press Founders Award. This annual award for a first book of poems honors the memory of three Hanging Loose founders: Ron Schreiber, Emmett Jarrett, and Robert Hershon.